Author: patriotsheart

Left wing podcaster Jennifer Welch, the woman who regularly calls Trump adviser Stephen Miller a ‘Nazi Jew’ is suddenly concerned about toxicity and division in American politics.

This is like an arsonist complaining about a house fire.

Welch has quickly risen to the top of progressive political media precisely because she says the type of horrible things that people on the left gobble up like cookies. She regularly makes insane and offensive claims about Trump, JD Vance, and various other Republicans.

Now she cares about division? Please.

The Daily Caller reports:

Welch previously praised a “No Kings” protester who rejoiced over Charlie Kirk’s assassination and described White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller as a “Nazi Jew.” After guest Katie Couric complained on the podcast about right-wing media spending time condemning left-wing individuals, Welch said it was “even more nefarious” that such content was what America’s enemies supposedly desire.

“[W]e know that a lot of our country’s adversaries want that type of social friction within the American public, and that the current sitting president campaigned on eliminating the enemy from within and not a message of unification,” Welch said. “That trickles down. And then you have these propaganda arms that, instead of focusing on ways that we can advance and progress as a country, they’re attacking other Americans.”

When Couric said such context was “toxic,” Welch agreed.

“Yeah, it’s really really toxic,” the host said.

See the video below:

NEW: Far-Left Podcaster Jennifer Welch *suddenly* worried about toxicity in politics — despite record of spewing hateful rhetoric against conservatives@DailyCaller pic.twitter.com/kS7Wvh916y

— Jason Cohen (@JasonJournoDC) December 16, 2025

Mediaite has included Welch on their list of the most influential people in media for 2025, describing her this way:

In 2025, Jennifer Welch, co-host of the explosive I’ve Had It podcast alongside Angie “Pumps” Sullivan, emerged as a highly controversial and provocative progressive force — channeling palpable rage against President Donald Trump and his administration, as well as Democratic complacency in the face of an electoral bloodbath…

Welch stoked MAGA anger by slamming Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika Kirk as a “grifter” exploiting women’s issues. These often too hot takes have made her a regular villain on Fox News and other conservative media. But the invites have kept on coming, because she knows how to push buttons — for better and for worse.

Democrats increasingly look like the party of the obnoxious, liberal sister-in-law.

Jennifer Welch does nothing to dispel that stereotype. In fact, she reinforces it.

The post Poisonous Left Wing Podcaster Jennifer Welch Suddenly Concerned About Toxicity and Division in American Politics (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

You know a Democrat is in serious trouble when they get negative coverage by a reliably left wing outlet like the Washington Post.

In the case of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, it wasn’t just a reporter or columnist calling out his budget proposal, it was the Editorial Board.

It seems they are concerned about the unfunded liabilities in the city’s pension programs. Johnson wants to create new taxes and raise some existing ones. The Washington Post sees this for what it is – a financial band-aid that won’t stop the bleeding.

From the Washington Post:

Chicago has lost its mind

Chicago has long-term structural problems with its finances, thanks in large part to wildly underfunded pensions. The country’s third-largest city has a history of using short-term gimmicks to paper over its problems, such as a notorious 2008 deal that sold off 75 years of future parking meter revenue for $1.15 billion, which was quickly spent. That deal is still hurting finances today, which should have taught local politicians that there is no substitute for serious fiscal reform. Alas, apparently not.

The city’s net operating budget increased almost 40 percent between 2019 and 2025, “subsidized in large part by temporary federal pandemic funding that kept the City financially afloat,” according to Grant McClintock of the Civic Federation. “The pandemic is over, but many of the programs and personnel positions established during that time remain, and without the benefit of the federal funding that previously supported them.”

Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) proposes to offset a $1.15 billion shortfall by taxing the businesses that anchor Chicago’s economy, borrowing and more gimmicks.

The mayor proposes to increase the tax on the lease of “personal property” like computers, vehicles and software from 11 percent to 14 percent, and to bring back the city’s “head tax,” which would result in large employers paying $33 per worker, per month.

By making it more expensive to do business or hire workers in the city, these measures threaten Chicago’s future economic growth and tax collections. These moves are especially reckless given that the Chicago Fed’s 12-month hiring outlook is the weakest it’s been since the pandemic. Gov. JB Pritzker (D) says the head tax would penalize employment.

Johnson was asked about this during a press event and rejected it, naturally. Watch:

WATCH: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson responds to a Washington Post editorial today that criticized his head tax proposal.

“Their information is wrong. But it wouldn’t be the first time a publication got something that I’ve done wrong.” https://t.co/3mYKqd4FuU pic.twitter.com/gxOTusSK3w

— Austin Berg (@Austin__Berg) December 15, 2025

Lori Lightfoot was a horrible mayor for Chicago, but Brandon Johnson somehow makes her look like a genius. How is that even possible?

The post WHOA: Liberal Washington Post Editorial Board Slams Mayor Johnson’s Budget Plan: ‘Chicago Has Lost its Mind’ appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Foreign Affairs

The ‘Trump Corollary’: What Has the President Added to Monroe?

Monroe wanted to keep European powers out. Trump may want to keep Latin American countries down.

(Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)

In December 1823, James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, articulated what has been named the Monroe doctrine, which would mature into an essential principle of American foreign policy. One of Monroe’s predecessors and America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, said it set the nation’s “compass.” A series of subsequent presidents would add corollaries that made the doctrine more muscular and suited it to the needs of the day. The latest president to add a corollary is number 47: Donald Trump.

Monroe never actually formalized a doctrine. Rather, the “Monroe doctrine” was ambiguously embedded in five sentences of his 1823 “Annual Message” or State of the Union Address.

Monroe begins by distinguishing between the events in Europe to which Americans are “interested spectators” and events “in this hemisphere” with which “we are of necessity more immediately connected.” He then places a protective fence around the Americas to keep European powers out.

By the time of the Annual Message, most of the new Spanish-American nations of the New World had declared their independence. Monroe said that it is “a principle…  that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”

And the U.S., under the new doctrine, wouldn’t oppose only recolonization by European powers, but also less aggressive forms of influence. Monroe declared “that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety” and that “we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”

Monroe then concluded that it was “impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of either continent without endangering our peace and happiness.” That, with all its ambiguity, is the entirety of the Monroe doctrine.

Spanish-American nations welcomed Monroe’s pronouncement as a fraternal pledge. In the recently published America, América: A New History of the New World, Greg Grandin quotes Simón Bolívar, the founding father of Latin American independence and unity, as celebrating that “The United States of the North have solemnly declared that they would view any measures taken by continental European powers against America and in favor of Spain as a hostile act against themselves.” Seen this way, Monroe’s doctrine amounted to a sort of Western hemispheric Article 5. But America’s southern neighbors would quickly find out how wrong they were, as a who’s who of U.S. presidents would invoke the Monroe doctrine to justify all manner of interference, embargo, coup, or war.

Theodore Roosevelt would be the first to append a corollary, stating clearly for the first time that America claimed the right to intervene in Latin America to enforce the doctrine. Lyndon Johnson would add another one, asserting America’s right to intervene in the domestic affairs of nations in its hemisphere to ensure that no communist government be established. Kennedy invoked the Monroe doctrine to justify illegal U.S. intervention in Cuba, claiming, “The Monroe Doctrine means… that we would oppose a foreign power extending its power to the Western Hemisphere.”

On the 202nd anniversary of the Monroe doctrine, Trump became the latest president to add a corollary.

In his announcement of the new “Trump Corollary,” Trump set the historical context for his policy. But he was wrong, as William LeoGrande, Professor of Government at American University and a specialist in U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, pointed out to me, when he asserted in his December 2, 2025 Presidential Message on the Anniversary of the Monroe doctrine that the Monroe doctrine is “a bold policy that… confidently asserts United States leadership in the Western Hemisphere.” 

“It does no such thing,” LeoGrande explains. “It simply asserts that a European effort at recolonization would pose a threat to the U.S.”

Trump misrepresents the Monroe doctrine to suit the more aggressive needs of the day. For all of the fanfare and bravado of the announcement, the Trump corollary is never clearly defined. The entire corollary is expressed in 19 words: “That the American people—not foreign nations nor globalist institutions—will always control their own destiny in our hemisphere.”

Trump says that his announcement “reaffirms” the promise of the Monroe doctrine and “reasserts” the policy. But, though he says that the Monroe doctrine is “reinvigorated by [his] Trump Corollary,” he never says how it is reinvigorated or what his corollary adds or changes.

The corollary seems to be a more aggressive restatement of the original. The doctrine has always been used to justify aggression and intervention in Latin America, but, like so much of what Trump does, the corollary has the brazenness to say out loud what previous presidents have kept clandestine. 

“In the past,” Grandin told me, 

policymakers invoked the Monroe doctrine as a doctrine of collective interest, or mutual hemispheric defense, even if they did so hypocritically. Trump, as usual, says the quiet part out loud, his so-called corollary openly admitting the doctrine is an instrument used to ensure U.S. hemispheric dominance.

If the corollary is in any way transformational, it is in its aggressiveness. The Monroe doctrine, though it is ambiguous and notoriously difficult to pin down, seems to set its parameters around European interference in our hemisphere. The Trump corollary seems to make no distinction between European nations and Latin American nations. It says that no “foreign nations” or “global institutions” will stand in the way of America controlling our “own destiny in our hemisphere.”

Washington, evidently, now claims the right to act militarily in Latin American countries to advance its geopolitical and economic interests in the hemisphere.

This more aggressive, interventionist reading is supported by the discussion of the Western Hemisphere and the Trump corollary in the White House’s recently released 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS).

The NSS explicitly says that the U.S. will “assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine… to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect… our access to key geographies throughout the region.” It does not limit itself to preventing European nations from recolonizing or allying with Latin American countries, but promises to deny “non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to… own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.” The document thereby asserts the right, not only to security preeminence, but self-serving commercial preeminence.

It does not bode well that one of the few concrete examples the NSS gives for how the “United States must reconsider our military presence in the Western Hemisphere” is the “obvious” one to “defeat cartels, including where necessary the use of lethal force to replace the failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades.”

The NSS aims to reverse the “major inroads” that “[n]on-Hemispheric competitors have made… into our Hemisphere… economically.” It stresses that “[t]he United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity—a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.”

The Trump corollary to the Monroe doctrine is brief and ill defined, but we know enough to see that advocates of U.S. foreign policy restraint should be worried. It seems to be best interpreted as a more muscular and aggressive expression of the original doctrine, bringing hemispheric dominance more to the fore. 

The danger for Latin American countries, and especially, at this moment, Venezuela, is that the updated Monroe doctrine can be used as a justification not only for barring non-hemispheric countries from interfering in the Western Hemisphere, but for U.S. intervention in Latin American countries that get in America’s way.

The post The ‘Trump Corollary’: What Has the President Added to Monroe? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs

European Alarmism Could Fuel a U.S. Backlash to NATO

Rep. Thomas Massie has already proposed withdrawing from the alliance.

Credit: Drop of Light

When NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warns, as he did last week, that the alliance must prepare “for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured,” he is not merely outlining a defense posture. He intends to commit more American blood and treasure, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. taxpayer, for an endless war in Europe against Russia.

But Rutte could, ultimately, help bring about the opposite: an American backlash to NATO that sees a reduction of U.S. commitment to the Western alliance.

This chorus of alarm led by Rutte has been amplified by Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who recently declared that Vladimir Putin “won’t stop” in Ukraine and directly compared the Russian president to Adolf Hitler. Such moral absolutism is not a strategy but a rhetorical accelerant, transforming a complex geopolitical conflict into a metaphysical crusade against evil and foreclosing any off-ramp but total victory or total defeat.

To be clear, dismissing these concerns does not require minimizing the Russian threat. Moscow’s actions in Ukraine are brutal and illegal. However, a sober assessment must separate capability from intention, and military reality from political hyperbole.

The blunt fact is that NATO’s conventional military capabilities are overwhelmingly superior to Russia’s across nearly every metric—from aggregate defense spending and technological sophistication to air power and naval reach. Russia’s war in Ukraine has revealed profound weaknesses in its armed forces. The only sphere of parity is the nuclear one, a domain where mutually assured destruction has guaranteed stability, however tense, for decades. 

Furthermore, there exists no credible intelligence or evidence that Russia is preparing to attack the NATO alliance. Its ambitions, however dangerous, appear limited to Ukraine, not existential from a European point of view.

As Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven has argued, the idea of a “deliberate, premeditated Russian attack on Nato ‘within five years’ is simply nonsense.” From a rational-actor perspective, it defies Moscow’s stated interests and capabilities. “Why in the name of God would we ourselves attack NATO?” a Russian official emphasized to Lieven. “What could we hope to gain? That’s absurd!”

As Lieven notes, geostrategically, any such attack would shatter Russia’s political goal of dividing the West and would indeed wind up “reuniting the West in opposition.” Militarily, it would pit Russia against an alliance with a combined GDP more than 20 times larger, in an era when the defense holds a crushing advantage, as proven in Ukraine. Politically, Putin has hesitated to demand full societal sacrifice for a war in Ukraine that many Russians deem vital for their country’s security; launching a war of choice against NATO would be politically suicidal.

The calls by Rutte and Merz are therefore not a calibrated response to a clear and present military danger, but a preemptive mobilization against a phantom menace of total war—one that conveniently justifies a continuation and escalation of American support for Europe’s security. Viewed cynically, their rhetoric amounts to a crass political maneuver—a familiar ritual wherein Euro-Atlantic elites inflate threats to justify their own relevance, secure budgets, and cement a permanent state of war.

But repeating such incendiary nonsense is not cost-free: Bellicose rhetoric, if repeated often enough, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By constantly invoking the specters of Hitler and total war, these leaders risk constructing the very reality they claim only to be preparing for, locking the continent into a doom loop of escalation where diplomacy is deemed appeasement and compromise is treason.

From an American perspective, the tone-deafness is staggering. Having grown accustomed to a security relationship where American power underwrites their stability, European politicians like Rutte and Merz profoundly underestimate the negative reaction they trigger when they casually invoke the sacrifice of a next generation of Americans to stop the “new Hitler.” They speak of “our” preparedness and “our” values, but the unspoken subtext is always clear: The heaviest lifting, the gravest losses, will once again be America’s to bear.

This perceived entitlement logically fosters growing resentment in America. It has found concrete, principled expression in Representative Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) newly introduced bill to withdraw the United States from NATO. His proposal is a direct political and philosophical rebuttal to the rhetoric personified by Rutte, Merz, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, and other hawkish European politicians.

When European leaders casually telegraph a return to 20th-century-scale warfare and paint conflict in apocalyptic, non-negotiable terms, is it any wonder that a growing number of Americans, consulting both their national interest and the wisdom of the Founders, ask, “Why are we signing up for this?”

Massie’s bill is the evidence of that shifting mood. It is the logical endpoint of a foreign-policy restrainer’s reconsideration of the status quo. His argument is simple and echoes the wisdom of George Washington: “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?” The legislation seeks to restrict U.S. funds for NATO’s budget, acknowledge that wealthy Europe can defend itself, and formally withdraw from an alliance whose purpose, Massie says, is no longer consistent with the national security interests of the United States.

The neoconservative and liberal-interventionist establishment will dismiss Massie as an outlier. They shouldn’t. He is a canary in the coal mine, signaling a buildup of pragmatic and principled dissent on foreign policy orthodoxy. His stance is a warning shot across the bow of a transatlantic project that has morphed from a defensive pact into an engine for expansion and conflict. 

Now, every time a European leader like Merz plays the Hitler card to score domestic points or a functionary like Rutte prophesies apocalyptic war, they will inadvertently fuel the case for Massie’s bill. They make Washington’s 18th-century warnings seem not like historical artifacts, but like urgent, contemporary counsel.

The path forward is not to shout down Massie and other restrainers, but to understand the legitimate grievances they channel. A sustainable transatlantic relationship cannot be built on a foundation of another American generational sacrifice treated as an inexhaustible reservoir for European moral certitude. It requires European allies who take their own defense seriously—in deeds, not just euros—and a diplomatic corps that seeks deescalation and political solutions with the same vigor it presently deploys misleading historical analogies.

Rutte’s vision of refighting our grandparents’ war and Merz’s reduction of Putin to Hitler are failures of statecraft. Massie’s bill is the sobering rebuttal. Ahead lies the urgent task of forging a truly interest-based American strategy: one that engages with the world through strength and diplomacy, but refuses to be drafted into foreign nightmares by officials for whom “preparedness” is a career strategy, moral posturing a substitute for policy, and war an abstraction to be fought by others.

The post European Alarmism Could Fuel a U.S. Backlash to NATO appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs

Trump Shouldn’t Give Ukraine NATO-Like Guarantees

It’s a bad idea that undermines diplomacy and U.S. interests—which may be the point.

(Photo by TOM BRENNER/AFP via Getty Images)

God helps those who help themselves. Now more than ever, Ukrainians should heed that timeless wisdom. 

A growing number of experts say the best way for Ukraine to safeguard its security after the war with Russia ends is to acquire the military capabilities needed “to deter future attacks and defend itself if deterrence fails,” as Jennifer Kavanagh of Defense Priorities put it in a study published Monday.

But news reports this week suggest the Trump administration is offering Kiev something that seems better in theory but may prove counterproductive in practice: a U.S. pledge to defend Ukraine if Russia ever invades again. One can imagine versions of such a “security guarantee” that would compel the U.S. to give Ukraine little more than moral support. But Kiev is pushing for a guarantee with a lot more bite than that.

The Trump administration should avoid promising to fight a direct war with Russia in defense of Ukraine, argue advocates of U.S. foreign policy restraint. Mark Episkopos of the Quincy Institute says that such a promise would lack credibility. “The past 3.5 years have been an ongoing test of whether the West will go to war against Russia over Ukraine, and the answer has been a resounding no,” Episkopos told The American Conservative. 

The dangers of such a lack of credibility are complex. Most obviously, a non-credible security guarantee would fail to deter Russia. Yet if Russia, doubting the credibility of a U.S. guarantee, attacked Ukraine again, America would feel pressure to defend its client rather than lose face—possibly leading to a direct conflict between two nuclear superpowers that neither of them expected to fight. And if Washington didn’t come to Ukraine’s defense, all of America’s alliance commitments would come into doubt.

It’s surprising that President Donald Trump appears poised to extend America’s superpower shield over Ukraine. After all, Trump has slashed U.S. funding for Ukraine’s war effort and threatened to cut the flow of weapons and intelligence. He has dismissed Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky as a manipulative ingrate. And he has repeatedly blasted Joe Biden for spending billions to support Ukraine. What explains the change in approach?

Politics has a lot to do with it. Due to various factors, Trump’s notorious fixation on getting a deal—any deal—has heightened in the case of Russia–Ukraine.

On the campaign trail, Trump said he’d resolve the war within one day of returning to the White House. Eleven months into his second term, Trump’s political incentives to get a quick deal are only growing. Russian victory would be a political fiasco for Trump on par with the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, from which Biden’s approval ratings never recovered.

The White House also has a strategic rationale for trying to achieve peace diplomatically, as it laid out in the recently published National Security Strategy. The document says the war has exacerbated animosities between Russia and Europe and that a negotiated settlement is needed to restore “conditions of strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass, and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states.”

Trump’s desperation for an agreement gives Kiev and European capitals leverage, since they can obstruct the peace process if he doesn’t accommodate their more hardline demands. Of course, by drawing closer to their position, the White House moves further away from Moscow’s—and likely also from any potential deal. But in recent days, the Ukrainian and European teams have played their hand well.

Over the weekend, Trump dispatched negotiators to meet with them in Berlin. Speaking to reporters in the White House on Monday, Trump said an agreement was “closer than ever.”

One reason for the optimism may be that Zelensky, ahead of talks with the U.S. delegation on Sunday, acknowledged that Ukraine won’t be joining NATO anytime soon. The Guardian said the statement “marks a big shift for Ukraine.” Since Russia launched its war in part to prevent Ukraine’s accession to the alliance, Zelensky’s comment struck many as a promising sign.

But there was a catch. If Ukraine won’t be joining the alliance, Zelensky said, Kiev will need “Article 5-like guarantees for us from the U.S.,” referring to the NATO treaty’s collective defense clause, which treats aggression against one as an attack on all. Extending that protection to Ukraine would give it a major benefit of the alliance without making it a formal member.

Influential MAGA luminaries like Steve Bannon, a former Trump advisor, vehemently oppose giving Ukraine such guarantees. They argue it’s not in America’s interest to acquire yet another faraway security dependent—in this case, one that could drag the U.S. into a catastrophic war. Indeed, Bannon himself has been warning the White House since at least February that Zelensky will demand security guarantees which threaten U.S. interests.

Evidently, those warnings were ignored by the delegation Trump sent to Berlin. One leading Russia hawk who attended the talks, Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, told reporters,

For the first time I heard from the mouths of American negotiators… that America would engage in security guarantees for Ukraine in such a way that the Russians would have no doubt that the American response would be military if the Russians attacked Ukraine again.

Moreover, European leaders released a joint statement after the talks praising “the strong convergence between the United States, Ukraine and Europe,” including a decision by Washington to “provide robust security guarantees.” If Washington and Kiev truly achieved a “strong convergence” on the issue, America First conservatives should be worried. Zelensky clearly aims to entangle the U.S. in a military alliance that doesn’t serve its own interests.

Not only would such an alliance be a nightmare scenario for MAGA and the United States, but Zelensky’s effort to bring it about is bad news for Ukrainians. 

Moscow opposes any military partnership between the West and Ukraine, so it likely would reject the security guarantees and other measures described by the European leaders. “This seems like a message from Mars,” Samuel Charap of the RAND Corporation wrote on X, reacting to the joint statement. “It is unrealistic to expect that Russia will agree to most (any?) of this.”

That may be the point. Many analysts, including the Russian-born journalist Leonid Ragozin—a committed liberal and no fan of Vladimir Putin—say Europe is trying to sabotage Trump’s diplomatic efforts. “The European strategy so far has been to alter the US-proposed peace plan in such a way that it becomes completely unacceptable to Russia,” Ragozin wrote this week in Al Jazeera.

Offering security guarantees to Kiev may win applause in European capitals, but it doesn’t bring Moscow any closer to ending its war in Ukraine. Trump will have better luck if he pushes instead for “armed non-alignment,” the model of Ukrainian security that Kavanagh elaborated in the aforementioned study. U.S. negotiators should familiarize themselves with the report, which details the military capabilities Ukraine needs to deter—but not threaten—Russia.

That’s not as flashy as American security guarantees, nor as attractive to Zelensky. But it’s both more credible and more likely to gain acceptance from Moscow. It also happens to be in the best interests of the nation President Trump leads.

The post Trump Shouldn’t Give Ukraine NATO-Like Guarantees appeared first on The American Conservative.

Former Turning Point USA lieutenant, BLEXIT Foundation co-founder, and podcaster Candace Owens opened up on her meeting with Turning Point CEO Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point co-founder Charlie Kirk, during a Tuesday episode of the Candace podcast. 

She opened the episode, telling her viewers “Shabbat Shalom” and “Happy Hanukkah,” as well as declaring, “Tucker Carlson is Adolf Hitler, and TikTok does need to be purchased by the Mossad,” apparently trolling her followers.

“Okay, you guys are crazy. You guys are absolutely crazy. The amount of people who attacked me for sending out a tweet being like, ‘Hey, I’m good, I’m alive, we had a very productive conversation,’ and they were like, ‘She got the call. She got the call. She’s betrayed us. She’s doing something else. I can’t believe it. This has all just been a show,’” Candace continued. “Calm down. Okay. What do you think happened? Erica said, ‘Stop.’ And then I was frozen for four and a half, four hours and 30 minutes, just like as I just put all of these talking points into my head? ”

Then, for more than 30 minutes, Owens discussed the meeting she had with Erika Kirk and doubled down on her skepticism over Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

This comes after Owens met with Erika Kirk and others from the Turning Point organization on Monday in “an extremely productive 4 1/2 hour meeting that I think we both feel should have taken place a lot earlier than it did,” Owens said in an X post following the much-anticipated meeting. The private meeting was in place of a public debate over Owens’s theories about Kirk’s murder after Owens declined to participate.

Their meeting followed a back-and-forth between the two in the media, where Erika Kirk appeared on Fox News last week and accused Candace Owens of “making hundreds and thousands of dollars every single episode, going after the people that I love because somehow they’re in on this.” Owens, a longtime friend of Charlie Kirk and vocal skeptic of the official narrative surrounding his death, responded, describing Erika’s interview as a “performance,” which she said “unmasked herself and the entire TPUSA machine in one interview.”

Then, on Saturday, Erika sat for a news town hall with CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, where she said she was worried that theories about the assassination of her late husband, including some unclear claims about Egyptian planes, would taint the jury pool and jeopardize the case against accused Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson. But Owens accused Erika of “completely dodging the question by confronting a claim that we never made,” adding, “Literally NO ONE accused Erika or Charlie of flying on Egyptian planes.”

Owens doubled down on the Egyptian planes, telling her audience on Tuesday night, “I am certain that these Egyptian planes are incredibly shady, and that they were, in fact, tracking Turning Point USA Faith, broader events. Of course, Erika was at some of them, Charlie was at some of them, but it is– the pattern here is undeniable.” She further said that she plans to present tomorrow “overwhelming evidence that these planes regularly fly in and out of Israel” and that they’re “turning their transponder off each time that they do it.”

Owens had suggested the French Government, Israel/Netanyahu, Jewish donors, the US government/Deep State, TPUSA leadership, Erika Kirk, and many others could be behind Charlie Kirk’s assassination or a cover-up after the fact, making some noteworthy and fair observations.

Owens opened up further on her meeting with Erika, sharing that she did not know what to expect walking into the meeting, and that “Erika was very clear that they were sort of most upset with what I— obviously in a bit of a fever pitch— when I tweeted that it was a God-forsaken company and people should not give money to it, and I have to own that that’s aggressive.” She continued, “That is actually aggressive. In the retrospect, I was very frustrated, and I don’t know, I just I felt like we weren’t getting any answers, and there were so many lies, and then I was getting attacked for asking all meaningful questions that was within their capacity to answer.”

But “Erika owned the lies, the lies, or rather, I guess they would cage it as miscommunications that were coming from various people at the company,” Ownes said. And the two cleared up the air on text messages allegedly sent by Charlie Kirk the night before he was assassinated, where he said that he believed he would be killed in the near future, which Erika vehemently denied last week during an interview with Glenn Beck, saying, “I have his cell phone,” and he “didn’t say that.”

Still, Candace said she wasn’t happy with some of the explanations she received in the meeting, where, according to Candace, they told her to ask “any question that you want.”

“I did not at all recant any of my suspicions, and I understand people disagree with me about particular people at Turning Point USA,” she said.

Candace specifically pointed to to Terrell Farnsworth, the guy who took SD cards out of the cameras after Charlie Kirk was shot; claims from other top Turning Point leaders; Turning Point Faith co-chair Pastor Rob McCoy and his son, Mikey McCoy, who was present when Charlie was shot; claims that there was no exit wound because Charlie’s bone density made him a “man of steel”; the narrative that Tyler Robinson is the actual shooter; Charlie Kirk allegedly turning down $150 million from Israel; and more.

WATCH:

The post WATCH: Candace Owens Doubles Down After Meeting with Erika Kirk and Turning Point USA – “I Did Not at all Recant ANY of my Suspicions” appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

The Vegas teens who callously mowed down a biking retired police chief in 2023 were sentenced up to life in prison.

Both teens will be eligible for parole in the mid 2040s, according to 8NewsNow.

As previously reported, Jesus Ayala, who just turned 18, is facing murder charges after he fatally struck 64-year-old retired police chief Andreas Probst. On August 14th, 2023 two teens allegedly stole a Hyundai, took the vehicle on a hit-and-run crime spree, and recorded it with a phone.

On August 29th, Las Vegas Police Detectives found the phone recording on social media and determined it was intentional.

A video posted to social media shows the phone recording from inside the stolen car as Ayala, who was 17 at the time, intentionally commits a hit-and-run. Ayala shouts expletives out the window after he randomly hits a car. After the hit-and-run, Ayala and Keys saw a bicyclist up ahead and went for it.

Ayala intentionally swerved the car and hit the bicyclist. 64-year-old Andreas Probst was hit at a high speed and flew over the car. The impact broke the windshield. “Hit his ass,” the teens said before Probst slammed into the windshield.

Jesus Ayala sped off and left the crash scene. Probst was taken to a nearby hospital and was pronounced dead.

Jesus Ayala was hit with 18 charges including murder, grand larceny, battery with use of a deadly weapon and attempted murder.

Ayala’s passenger, Jzamir Keys, (who was 16 at the time) was hit with 3 charges, including a murder charge.

The teens were previously seen in court smirking and laughing.

Excerpt from 8NewNow:

A Clark County District Court judge sentenced two young men Tuesday to decades in prison after they killed a retired police chief in a deadly crime spree.

Jesus Ayala, 20; and Jzamir Keys, 18, appeared to intentionally mow down two bicyclists in the northwest Las Vegas valley in August 2023. Retired California police chief Andreas “Andy” Probst, 64, died when Ayala and Keys intentionally collided with him. Another bicyclist, a man in his 70s, survived.

Ayala’s defense team and prosecutors agreed to a sentence of 20 years to life, as outlined in the plea agreement. The plea agreement for Keys specified a prison term of 18 years to life.

On Tuesday, Clark County District Court Judge Jacqueline Bluth sentenced the young men to the terms of the agreements.

“This was so much more than a joyride,” Bluth said. “It just kept going and going and escalating and escalating, and more people kept getting hurt.”

The post Las Vegas Teens Who Callously Mowed Down Biking Retired Police Chief Sentenced to Life in Prison appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

This is a Gateway Hispanic article.

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The investigation of the shooting at Brown University has been a total train wreck. Officials from the university, the state of Rhode Island, and the city of Providence have looked ridiculous at various moments over the last few days.

No one seems to know anything, or if they do, they are not sharing all of the details with the public. There are reports that the shooter yelled something before the shooting but authorities will not tell the public what was said.

Details on a motive or any type of explanation have been slow to materialize.

Independent journalist Mark Halperin shared some details today that he is getting from sources. He says that he is being told that Ella Cook, the vice president of the College Republicans at Brown University, was the actual ‘target’ of the shooting. Cook was one of the two people killed in the shooting.

In the video below, Mark says:

“I believe in being transparent here. If I were editing The New York Times, I don’t think I’d put it in the paper,” says @MarkHalperin. But people are telling me that the family of Ella Cook, the Alabama young woman who was a sophomore, has been told that she was the target of what happened at Brown.

I have no idea whether that’s true. There’s other theories about why the person did what they did. And since we don’t know who the assailant is, it’s going to be harder to say. But if it’s true that she was targeted, that’s a big story because she was one of the most visible conservatives on that campus.”

Watch the video:

“I believe in being transparent here. If I were editing The New York Times, I don’t think I’d put it in the paper,” says @MarkHalperin. But people are telling me that the family of Ella Cook, the Alabama young woman who was a sophomore, has been told that she was the target of… pic.twitter.com/MgcwIBEIKu

— 2WAY (@2waytvapp) December 16, 2025

There are very few conservative students at Brown. What are the odds that the shooter hit Ella Cook randomly?

.8% of Brown University students identify as very Conservative.

Ella Cook was that .8% on a campus of very far Left radicals.

I’m not buying this was random and Brown doesn’t have any info.

Poor Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov was in the wrong place at the wrong time. pic.twitter.com/FRSE3SHx8s

— C3 (@C_3C_3) December 16, 2025

If Brown is trying to cover up certain details about this shooting, they are running a fool’s errand. This is all going to come out eventually.

The post Sources Telling Mark Halperin That Republican Student Ella Cook Was ‘Target’ of Shooting at Brown University (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

When it comes to allegations of Somali fraud, it appears that the state of Minnesota is not alone.

A whistleblower who used to work with an organization that partners with the state of Maine, is now claiming that there is another massive Medicaid scheme taking place in the state of Maine.

The city of Lewiston, Maine has been a destination for Somali migrants for years, much like Minneapolis.

This just reinforces the idea that more investigation is needed.

NewsNation reported:

Maine Medicaid contractor denies fraud allegations; records contradict defense

A Maine health services contractor facing fraud allegations from a whistleblower denied the claims and said the former employee never raised concerns during his employment, but records show his manager documented him flagging fraudulent billing.

Gateway Community Services, a Somali American-led organization, issued a press release stating: “These allegations are false. Gateway Community Services maintains strict billing, documentation, and compliance protocols and has cooperated with state oversight agencies.”

The organization said Christopher Bernardini, who spent seven years working for Gateway, “at no point during his employment did he raise any concerns—formal or informal—related to inaccurate billing, fraud, or impropriety.”…

Bernardini alleges Gateway oversaw a system in which false records were filed about client visits and charged taxpayers for services never provided.

“We started getting some clients calling and saying months later that their client owed them hours. They hadn’t come in for these shifts and stuff. But I had a time card for it,” Bernardini told NewsNation. When asked if what he witnessed was fraud, he responded, “Absolutely. No doubt about it.”

See the video report below:

OMG

Whistleblower details massive Somali fraud scheme in Mainepic.twitter.com/xXWEycNmiL

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 16, 2025

WMTW News in Maine is also covering this:

Local and national Republicans are calling for an investigation into organizations that work with immigrants and receive federal Medicaid funding.

At the same time, 8 Investigates has learned that a Lewiston nonprofit called Gateway Community Services, which provides these services, will be part of the state audit this year, amid ongoing questions about its finances.

8 Investigates has received documentation showing that between 2015 and 2018, the state overpaid the nonprofit $662,608. The Maine Department of Health and Human Services said this is a result of two multi-year audits of Gateway Community Services after investigating tens of thousands of billing claims across multiple service categories. There was another audit done at Gateway that was completed in 2024, which is currently in the appeal process. Both audits were done as a result of complaints, according to DHHS.

It seems like this Somali fraud issue is more widespread than the media is reporting.

The post Whistleblower Claims Massive Somali Medicaid Fraud Scheme Happening in the State of Maine (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.